Work: A Deep History, from the Stone Age to the Age of Robots

by James Suzman

While the volume of food produced for human consumption today is staggering, the number of distinct plant and animal species we routinely consume is not. Despite the fact that in most of the world’s cities, one can now eat cuisine from countries from every continent, only the most cosmopolitan have a diet approaching the diversity of hunter-gatherers living in territories not much larger than a suburb in a modern city. The majority of land under cultivation across the globe is used for the purposes of growing a limited number of high-energy-yielding crops. Nearly two-thirds of it is now used for growing cereals (mainly wheat, maize, rice, and barley). The next largest crop category, accounting for roughly one-tenth of all land under cultivation, is devoted to producing oil-based crops like canola and palm oil for cooking, cosmetics, and other applications. The remaining 30 percent or so of land under cultivation forms a patchwork of pulses, sugar crops, roots and tubers, fruits, vegetables, herbs, spices, teas, coffees, non-food crops like cotton, and also narcotics like coca leaves and tobacco. Part of the reason for the huge tracts of land used for cultivating high-yielding cereals, other than the fact that it provides us with low-cost carbohydrate-rich calories, is that it is needed to fatten domestic animals, which are farmed on roughly 75 percent of all agricultural land, to slaughter-weight as quickly as possible, or assist them to produce prodigious quantities of mi...

Malthus’s bruised reputation now is not only a result of the fact that the collapse he insisted was imminent didn’t occur. Neither is it because his warnings were enthusiastically embraced by fascists to justify their enthusiasm for genocide and eugenics. It is also because when viewed through a contemporary lens his argument does a remarkable job of upsetting people across the political spectrum. Malthus’s insistence that there are clear limits to growth upsets those who support unbridled free markets and perpetual growth, and chimes favorably with those who are concerned about sustainability. But his insistence that the majority of people will always be poor because inequality and suffering are part of God’s divine plan pleases some religious conservatives, yet gravely offends many on the secular left.

And in every instance, they note, where a surge in agricultural productivity as a result of a clever new technology made one or two lucky generations thrive, population growth quickly restored everything back to a more miserly baseline. They have also noted the opposite effect when populations declined suddenly as a result of disease or war. Thus, for instance, once the initial shock caused by the huge numbers of deaths from the bubonic plague in Europe in the mid-fourteenth century died down, average material living standards and real wages improved considerably for a couple of generations, before populations recovered and living standards declined to their historical average.

Second, he put his finger on one of the main reasons that people in agricultural societies had to work so hard. Malthus believed that the reason peasants bred so enthusiastically is because of raw uncontrolled lust. But there is another, more important reason too. Farmers were all too aware of the correspondence between how hard they worked and how well they might eat over the course of a year. There were many variables that they couldn’t control when it came to making sure they took in an adequate harvest and the health of their livestock—like droughts, floods, and disease—but there were many variables that they could manage. There were also things they could do to limit the impact of big, near-existential risks, and all of these involved work. The problem was that there was rarely labor to spare, and for most farmers the only obvious solution to this problem was to procreate. But in doing so they stumbled into one of Malthus’s snares. For each new laborer they gave birth to was not only an additional mouth to feed, but after a point resulted in a noticeable decline in food yields per person. This left farmers with few options: go hungry, take land from a neighbor, or expand into virgin territory. The history of agriculture’s rapid spread through Asia, Europe, and Africa shows that in many instances they chose the last.

For subsistence farming societies, in other words, the “economic problem” and scarcity was often a matter of life and death. And the only obvious solution to it involved working harder and expanding into new territory. It is perhaps unsurprising, then, despite the fact that hardly any of us now produce our own food, that the sanctification of scarcity and the economic institutions and norms that emerged during this period still underwrite how we organize our economic life today.

“If every Man and Woman would work four Hours each Day on something useful,” he enthused, “that Labor would produce sufficient to procure all the Necessaries and Comforts of Life.”

“Remember that time is money,” Franklin said, before reminding the young tradesman of money’s apparently organic powers to grow over time, in the form of either interest on loans or assets accruing value. “Money can beget Money,” he warned, “and its Offspring can beget more [but] whoever kills a breeding sow destroys all her Offspring to the thousandth Generation.”

The fact that dogs were domesticated long before any other creatures and still share the closest partnership with humans is a reminder that while most domestic animals are now food, for much of the history of domestication the primary job of most domestic animals was to do work, and through the intimacy of that work the relationship was sometimes transformed into one of mutual loyalty and even love.

Well-to-do Romans were more likely than Greeks to kill and torture their slaves for trivial indiscretions. But otherwise they expressed similar attitudes to slavery and work as the ancient Greeks and, like Victorian Britons nearly two millennia later, considered themselves to be the inheritors of the ancient Greeks’ civilization. They too considered manual work demeaning, and working for a living to be vulgar. It was only appropriate for citizens to engage in big business, politics, law, the arts, or military pursuits.

The fact that the Roman economy was sustained by what were, from the point of view of most citizens, intelligent working machines posed some similar economic challenges to those posed by large-scale automation. One of these was wealth inequality.

The movement of 250 million rural Chinese into cities to take up jobs in its rapidly growing manufacturing sector between 1979 and 2010 was the single largest migration event in human history. It resulted not only in the almost overnight appearance of brand-new, still under-occupied “ghost cities” but also saw established cities swallowing up sequences of quiet rural hamlets, villages, farms, and towns, as they expanded into the countryside.

For Vere Gordon Childe, the “urban revolution” was the crucial second phase of the agricultural revolution. The first phase involved the painfully slow process of gradually domesticating livestock, grains, and other plant crops over many generations. It was also characterized by gradual development and refinement of simple technologies like artificial irrigation, the plow, draft animals, brick-making, and metallurgy, which “demonstrably furthered the biological welfare of our species by facilitating its multiplication.”4 By contrast, the urban phase, he argued, only ever came about once a critical threshold in agricultural productivity was crossed and farmers were able to generate consistently large enough surpluses to support bureaucrats, artists, politicians, and others that they were generous enough not to think of as “freeloaders.” It was characterized by the appearance of cities that were provisioned by merchants, governed by monarchs, and administered by priests, soldiers, and bureaucrats.

Like living organisms, cities are born, sustained, and grown by capturing energy and putting it to work. And when for one reason or another cities cease to be able to secure the energy they need, like organisms deprived of air, food, and water, they surrender to entropy, decay, and die. In the early years of our species’ urban history, this was more common than one might think. Sometimes cities and towns were throttled by rivals who laid siege to them. On other occasions they perished because of droughts, plagues, and other acts of God. This is thought to have been the fate of the many ancient cities, towns, and settlements that appear to archaeologists to have been abandoned for no obvious reason almost overnight.

With urbanites no longer hostage to the challenges of food production, the first cities gave rise to an efflorescence of new professions. And in cities, some of these professions assumed a level of social importance that would have been unimaginable to mobile foragers or even farmers living in small villages.

The historical association of specific neighborhoods with particular trades was not a quirk of zoning regulations or the result of careful urban planning. Nor was it the consequence of the fact that it makes good commercial sense for consumers looking for particular items to be able to go to one part of town to compare different wares on offer. It was because in the pulsing, plural hearts of big cities, people found companionship and comfort among others who did similar work and so shared similar experiences, with the result that in cities people’s individual social identities often merged with the trades they performed. Inscriptions on tombstones and written records from Imperial Rome describe 268 different career paths that ancient Romans pursued. Besides bureaucratic, construction, engineering, artisanal, mercantile, and soldiering jobs, many other jobs Romans did were the antecedents of some of the service-sector jobs that now account for most employment in modern, mainly urban states like the United States. And among the ranks of Roman service-sector personnel were lawyers, scribes, secretaries, accountants, chefs, administrators, advisers, teachers, prostitutes, poets, musicians, sculptors, painters, entertainers, and courtesans who—assuming they could secure the right patronage or were independently wealthy—could dedicate all their working lives to achieving mastery of their particular art.

“Put writing in your heart that you may protect yourself from hard labor of any kind,” an Egyptian father famously said to his son as he dispatched him to school in the third millennium BC, adding that “the scribe is released from manual tasks” and that it is “he who commands.”6

Keynes was not clear about whether he considered his absolute needs to include having wines appropriately matched to the food he was eating, a country house for weekends, or decent Turkish tobacco for his pipe. But in distinguishing between absolute and relative needs, he recognized the importance of social context and status in shaping people’s desires. In this respect, he was thinking more like social anthropologists who unlike economists are interested in understanding why in some contexts, such as cities, diamonds are more valuable than water, whereas in others, such as traditional foraging communities in the Kalahari Desert—which now hosts the two richest diamond mines ever discovered—diamonds were worthless but water was priceless.

Foragers like the Ju/’hoansi remind us that we are as capable of ordering ourselves into fiercely egalitarian societies as we are of ordering ourselves into rigid hierarchies. As a result, many historians have argued that even if inequality is not a brute fact of human nature, then along with zoonotic diseases, despotism, and war, it was probably a direct and immediate consequence of our embrace of agriculture. They reason that as soon as people had big surpluses to hoard, exchange, or distribute, the more miserable angels of our nature took over. But extreme inequality was not an immediate and organic consequence of our ancestors’ transition to farming. Many early agricultural societies were far more egalitarian than modern urban ones, and in ancient rural villages and hamlets people often worked cooperatively, shared the product of their labors evenly, and only hoarded surpluses for collective benefit. There is also plenty of evidence to suggest this archaic form of “kibbutz” egalitarianism endured because it was an effective way to manage the recurrent episodes of material scarcity that fast-growing farming populations routinely suffered. Thus, for instance, the small-scale farmers who established themselves across much of what is now Spain and Portugal over the course of the first millennium BC are thought by some archaeologists to have been “assertively egalitarian”—until the Roman legions appeared on the horizon in the first century BC.

The growth of Britain’s economy increasingly came to depend on people employed in manufacturing and other industries reinvesting their wages in the very same products they and their factory workers manufactured.

Durkheim introduced the idea of anomie in his first book, The Division of Labour in Society, but developed it much further in his second monograph Suicide: A Study in Sociology, in which he aimed to show that suicide, which at the time was widely thought to be a reflection of profound individual failings, often had social causes and so presumably could also have social solutions. He used the term to describe the feelings of intense dislocation, anxiety, and even anger that drove people to behave antisocially and, when desperate, perhaps take their own lives. When Durkheim described anomie in this way he was trying to make sense of how the rapid changes brought about by industrialization affected individual well-being. He was particularly intrigued by the fact that, almost paradoxically, the increase in prosperity that accompanied industrialization in France had resulted in more suicides and greater social stress. This led him to conclude that it was the changes associated with urbanization and industrial development that were a major driver of anomie.

An example he offered was of traditional craftsmen whose skills were suddenly rendered redundant by technological advances and who, as a result, lost their status as valuable, contributing members of society, and were forced to endure lives robbed of the purposefulness that their work once provided them. Durkheim not only credited anomie with suicide, but also with a whole host of other social problems that up to then were commonly attributed to bad character, like crime, truancy, and antisocial behavior.

The Great Depression put further downward pressure on working hours as companies cut production. This process spurred an embryonic “shorter hours movement,” and very nearly persuaded the Roosevelt administration to introduce the thirty-hour workweek into law in the form of the Black-Connery 30-Hours Bill, which sailed through the Senate in 1932 with a fifty-three to thirty majority. Pulled at the last minute when President Roosevelt got cold feet, the bill was abandoned, and as the worst of the Depression passed, hours crept steadily upward again. By the time Hitler’s panzers rolled into Poland in the autumn of 1939, most employed Americans were working thirty-eight-hour weeks again.

As unevenly distributed as wealth and income are, most people in industrialized economies probably now meet something resembling the basic living standards that Keynes had in mind when he imagined that “absolute needs” would be adequately met. In the United States, for instance, median net wealth of households in 2017 was $97,000.8 That is three times higher than it was in 1946 but a good deal less than it was in 2006, just before the subprime crisis sent the global economy into a tailspin. Median household wealth then was in the region of six times higher than in 1946.9 Tellingly, it is also only roughly one-seventh of the average household net worth in the United States, a number skewed upward by high levels of inequality. But working hours have not declined as Keynes predicted. Indeed, despite labor productivity in industrialized nations having risen roughly four- or five-fold since the end of the Second World War, average weekly working hours everywhere have continued to gravitate toward an average of just under forty hours per week, and then remain stubbornly stuck there. Economists have long debated why working hours have remained so stubbornly high, but most agree that one part of the answer is reflected in the story of what remains the world’s bestselling cereal brand.

Every year an estimated 128 billion bowls of Kellogg’s breakfast cereals are fed into hundreds of millions of hungry mouths. The Kellogg’s brand is synonymous with a cast of cheerful spoon-wielding cartoon characters who grin from its packaging and commercials. None of these characters much resemble their founding ancestor, John Harvey Kellogg, a Seventh-Day Adventist with a rebellious streak, a passion for healthy living, and a pathological hatred of anything to do with sex. An advocate for universal circumcision because he believed it might dissuade boys from masturbating, he invented a small range of breakfast cereals designed specifically to curb the passions of the patients who attended the Battle Creek Sanatorium, the vegetarian “wellness” retreat he established in 1886. His cereals were not intended to be particularly tasty. John Harvey Kellogg was of the view that spicy, rich, and sweet food induced unwanted sexual urges but that plain food calmed them. Corn flakes, which he patented in 1895, were developed specifically as a sexual turn-off.

Kellogg did something else that was unusual. He cut full-time working hours at his factories from an already reasonable forty hours a week to a comfortable thirty hours a week, based on five six-hour shifts. By doing this, he was able to create an entire shift’s worth of new full-time jobs in a period when up to a quarter of Americans were unemployed. It seemed a sensible thing to do for other reasons too. By the 1930s, American workers were already lobbying for shorter working hours after companies like Henry Ford’s had successfully introduced weekends and five-day weeks with no noticeable dip in productivity (if anything, there was an increase in profitability), and so Kellogg believed that his thirty-hour week was putting him on the right side of a historical trend. It turned out to be the right thing to do for Kellogg’s bottom line as well. Production-halting work-related accidents became far more infrequent, and his operating overheads declined so much that in 1935 Kellogg boasted in a newspaper article that “we can [now] afford to pay as much for six hours as we formerly paid for eight.”

Then, somewhat to the surprise of management, three-quarters of Kellogg’s factory staff voted in favor of returning to eight-hour shifts and a forty-hour week. Some of the workers explained that they wished to return to an eight-hour day because the six-hour shifts meant they spent too much time getting under the feet of irritable spouses back at home. But most were clear: they wanted to work longer hours to take home more money, to purchase more or better versions of the endless procession of constantly upgraded consumer products coming on to the market during America’s affluent postwar era.

The Affluent Society, which was published to great acclaim in 1958.

One of the main reasons that Galbraith took this view was post-war Americans’ seemingly limitless appetite for purchasing things they didn’t need. Galbraith believed that by the 1950s most Americans’ material desires were as manufactured as the products they purchased to satisfy them. Because most people’s basic economic needs were now easily met, he argued, producers and advertisers conspired to invent new artificial needs to keep the hamster wheel of production and consumption rolling rather than investing in public services.

For Galbraith, advertising served another counterintuitive purpose beyond keeping the cycle of production and consumption rolling. He thought it made people worry less about inequality because, as long as they were able to purchase new consumer products once in a while, they felt that they were upwardly mobile and so closing the gap between themselves and others. “It has become evident to conservatives and liberals alike,” he noted drily, “that increasing aggregate output is an alternative to redistribution or even to the reduction of inequality.”

In 1980, though, that relationship broke down. In the “Great Decoupling,” productivity, output, and gross domestic product all continued to grow, but wage growth for all but the highest paid stalled. Over time, many people started to notice that their monthly wages didn’t stretch as far as they used to, despite the fact that they were doing the same jobs they had in the same, profitable, businesses.

The Great Decoupling killed off any lingering downward pressure on the length of the workweek. Most people simply couldn’t afford to maintain their lifestyles by working fewer hours. Many took on lots more personal and household debt, which conveniently enough at the time was very cheap. Among the better paid segments of the workforce, it encouraged a net rise in hours worked, as the potential rewards for “top achievers” suddenly went through the roof.

For many others, though, the Great Decoupling was the first clear evidence that technological expansion was cannibalizing the workforce and concentrating wealth in fewer hands. They point out that in 1964, the telecom giant AT&T was worth $267 billion in today’s dollars and employed 758,611 people. This works out at roughly one employee to every $350,000 of value. Today’s communications giant, Google, by contrast, is worth $370 billion and has only around 55,000 employees, which works out at roughly $6 million of value per employee. The process was facilitated by a series of important political developments. There was the deregulation of markets and “trickle-down economics” championed by Thatcher and Reagan, as well as, later, the collapse of Communism and the embrace of oligarchy capitalism in the former Soviet Republics, and the rise of the Southeast Asian “tiger economies” spurred by China’s embrace of state capitalism.

In 1965, chief executives in the top 350 U.S. firms took home roughly twenty times the pay of an “average worker.”15 By 1980, CEOs in the same top bracket of firms took home thirty times the annual salary of an average worker, and by 2015, that number had surged to just shy of three hundred times. Adjusted for inflation, most U.S. workers gained a modest 11.7 percent rise in real wages between 1978 and 2016, while CEOs typically enjoyed a 937 percent increase in remuneration.

According to official statistics, working hours in South Korea, China, and Japan have declined considerably over the last two decades, with the greatest strides being taken in South Korea. This shift has been credited in part to the advocacy of anti-karoshi groups pushing for a more harmonious work–life balance. In Japan in 2018, for example, the average worker officially clocked around 1,680 hours of work, 141 hours fewer than in 2000. This is close to 350 more hours per year than German workers but 500 less than Mexican workers. It is also below the average for the world’s elite club of nations nominally committed to free trade, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.4 But there is also a well-established culture of under-reporting working hours in Japan, China, and South Korea, and survey data of employees suggest that for many work remains as all-dominating as it ever was.

They now order their working lives according to the mantra “996.” The two 9s refer to the requirements to put in twelve-hour days, from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., and the 6 refers to the six days of the week that employees with ambitions to get anywhere are expected to be at their workstations.

The stress fractures and thickening of the work-worn bones of farming peoples show that ever since some of our ancestors substituted their bows and digging sticks for plows and hoes, death by overwork has been a thing. Besides the many who through history have died while “trying to save the farm,” there are the countless souls who were worked to death under whips held by others: the slaves that ancient Romans dispatched to their mines and quarries; the descendants of the men and women stolen from Africa who led hard, abbreviated, and brutalized lives in the cotton and sugar plantations of the Americas; the tens of millions who perished in twentieth-century gulags, labor colonies, prisons, and concentration camps as a result of committing crimes or finding themselves on the wrong side of one or another -ocracy, -ism, or ego; and those who, like the rubber harvesters in King Leopold’s Congo or along the Putamoyo River in Colombia at the turn of the twentieth century, were viewed as little more than a disposable mass of cheap laborers. But what makes the individual stories of karoshi and karo jisatsu different from these is the fact that what drove the likes of Miwa Sado to lose or take their lives was not the risk of hardship or poverty but their own ambitions refracted through the expectations of their employers.

Indeed, what is perhaps unique about the Confucian belt economies in this respect is not that death by overwork is more common there than anywhere else, but the fact that people there are more willing to engage with it as a problem. In Western Europe and North America, deaths by overwork are usually attributed to individual failings rather than the actions or failings of an employer or their government. As a result, they don’t form part of the national conversation, or feature in news headlines, or result in grieving relatives demanding abject apologies from employers or action by governments.

the CEO of France Telecom was forced to step down and several senior managers were put on trial charged with “moral harassment,” as a consequence of the toxic working culture they instilled at the company and that prosecutors insisted contributed to thirty-five suicides among staff members over the course of 2008 and 2009.

There is now much more discussion about mental-health issues in the workplace in countries like Britain and the United States. And for good reason if the statistics are anything to go by. In Britain, the Health and Safety Executive reported in 2018 that close to 15 million work days were lost as a result of workplace-related stress, depression, and anxiety, and that among a total workforce of 26.5 million, nearly 600,000 individuals self-reported suffering from work-related mental health issues that year.7 But it is hard to tell from this data whether the reason more mental-health issues in the workplace are diagnosed is because in many countries there is now a trend to pathologize what were once considered to be perfectly normal stresses and anxieties. And one particularly important manifestation of the tendency to pathologize is the now widespread acceptance that “workaholism” is a real, diagnosable condition with potentially fatal consequences.

The Confessions of a Workaholic

The supremacy of the service sector in many economies is a relatively recent phenomenon. Up until the surge in agricultural production across Europe during the sixteenth century, an estimated three-quarters of Britons still made a living as farmers, quarrymen, foresters, and fishermen.

Technology and automation played an important role in transforming what were once labor-intensive manufacturing industries into capital-intensive ones. So too did globalization, as the most labor-intensive industries progressively began losing out to manufacturers operating in geographies where labor was cheaper than in Britain.

Other economies, among them China’s, also seem to be tacking along the path Clark predicted, with services going steadily upward in proportion to the decline in agriculture, and with manufacturing progressively declining in importance. But it is hard to account for the massive increase in service-sector professions as a response to actual deep need, or even the efforts of advertisers and influencers to persuade us of their importance.

“It’s as if someone were out there making up pointless jobs just for the sake of keeping us all working,” he argued.17 For each person in a role which they may think of as a bullshit job, there are of course others in near identical roles who nevertheless find satisfaction, purpose, and fulfillment in them. Even so, the fact that workplace surveys consistently find more people are dissatisfied with the work they do, suggests that this is often just a coping mechanism—a characteristic of a species whose evolutionary history has been shaped so profoundly by its need for purpose and meaning.

At California State University, for instance, the total number of managerial and professional administrators employed rose from 3,800 in 1975 to 12,183 in 2008, while the total number of teaching positions only rose from 11,614 to 12,019. This is equivalent to an increase in the number of teaching staff of 3.5 percent versus 221 percent in administrative staff. Notably, almost all of the administrative staff expansion was in office-based bureaucratic roles. In fact, over the same period the number of clerical, service, and maintenance jobs declined by almost a third.20

In the most recent iteration of Gallup’s annual State of the Global Workplace report, it is revealed that only very few people find their work meaningful or interesting. They note soberly that “the global aggregate from Gallup data collected in 2014, 2015 and 2016 across 155 countries indicates that just 15% of employees worldwide are engaged in their job. Two-thirds are not engaged, and 18% are actively disengaged.” They do, however, note some significant differences in engagement across different geographies. The U.S. and Canada, where 31 percent and 27 percent respectively of the workforces are engaged by their jobs, are the world leaders in “workplace engagement.” By contrast, only 10 percent of Western European workers are engaged, but at least they are happier than workers in Japan, China, South Korea, Hong Kong, and Taiwan where only between five and seven out of every hundred workers are stimulated by their work.

The rise of the service sector may be a testament to our collective creativity when it comes to inventing new jobs to accommodate those ejected from the production lines in the ever more automated and efficient manufacturing sector. But we clearly aren’t that clever when it comes to creating (or rewarding) jobs people are likely to find meaningful or fulfilling.

technological unemployment,” warned John Maynard Keynes when describing his post-work utopia. “This means unemployment due to our discovery of means of economizing the use of labor outrunning the pace at which we can find new uses for labor,” he added. It was a sensible clarification for his 1930s audience.

They also noted that some professions appeared to be largely immune from automation, at least in the short term. Among these were those that depended on the slippery arts of persuasion, like public relations; those that demanded a high degree of empathy, like psychiatry; those that required creativity, like fashion design; and those that demanded a high degree of manual or finger dexterity, like surgeons.

labor, are pretty much the same everywhere. However, automation is not only likely to entrench further structural inequality between countries. Without a fundamental shift in the way economies are organized, it will dramatically exacerbate inequality within many countries as well. It will do this firstly by diminishing opportunities for unskilled and semi-skilled people to find decent employment, while simultaneously inflating the incomes of those few who continue to manage what are largely automated businesses.6 As importantly, it will increase returns on capital rather than labor, so expanding the wealth of those who have cash invested in businesses, rather than those who depend on taking cash from them in exchange for labor. This means straightforwardly that automation will generate further wealth for the already wealthy, while further disadvantaging those who do not have the means to purchase stakes in companies and so free-ride off the work done by automata.